Brightening The Barn
Expertly placed lighting can entirely transform your space and bring your project to life. By balancing light and shade to create dimension, depth and height, enriching energy is injected into a home in ways other design elements can’t achieve on their own. A country-style home calls for a certain type of lighting to enhance the warm and comfortable atmosphere of this charming design aesthetic. Here, Melbourne Home Design + Living’s Jacqueline Foy sits down with Jesse-Lee Stringer, managing director of Barn Light Australia, to share in his expert insight into how specialised lighting can illuminate your space and elevate the rustic beauty of country homes.
The finesse of lighting brings the finishing touch to a home. It greets you as you pull into the driveway, showing you the way to the front door and welcoming you home. It creates a sense of warmth when sitting by the fire or leads the eye to a special picture when you walk down the hallway. Barn Light Australia’s specialty barn-style lighting can be used to create a mood, emphasise architectural features, or make the space appear larger and more inviting. According to Stringer, strategic placement of light fixtures in areas that are used often, such as living rooms and bedrooms, can add warmth and comfort to these spaces, while a modest pendant can make a room more homely simply by removing the clinical appearance of downlights. Below, Stringer talks us through making your country-style house a home with the power of light using these techniques and more.
Home Is Where The Heart Is
A successful country-style home balances the best elements of rustic and vintage interior design styles with a certain warmth and personality. According to Stringer, warmth, comfort and a worldly charm epitomise the style. “I imagine a cosy kitchen with pendants and cottage wall lights above windows and over a rustic porcelain sink. Reading nooks with a small wall light highlighting a bookcase or artworks,” he says. His picture-perfect vision continues with a wrap-around veranda with cottage wall lights near windows and doorways creating an invitation to sit with a cup of tea overlooking the barn, highlighted by big gooseneck barn lights.
In terms of task lighting for a country home, Stringer gives the example of a kitchen island bench. Being a multi-functional space, they necessitate different types of lighting to enhance the ways the spaces feels and is used. From food preparation and the need for neutral lighting from down lights, to a place to sit and chat over a glass of wine under barn pendants that illuminate the area with a soft, warm glow, the lighting impacts both the mood and functionality of a room.
From colour and texture to furniture choice, a key element that makes a country-style home is the use of natural materials. Timber construction, rustic, exposed wooden beams and wood panelling accentuated by warm lighting bring the barn-house aesthetic to the forefront, alongside barn doors, or rough and organic textures that bring out the appearance of age, which is celebrated in country-style interior design.
Let There Be Light
If your country-style home is heritage listed, finding a light manufactured near the time period, in the right colour, and in good condition to install can be considerably difficult. Whether you are looking for a particular style to enhance your existing country home or wanting to foster a rustic look for a new build, Barn Light Australia can help you find a barn light that fits right in with your country-style home.
“The obvious benefit of our cottage wall lights is the slimline styling of the arm and shade to which it is mounted,” Stringer says. “The smaller size profile of having a smaller light, you can illuminate signs, door numbers, key boxes, and similar entry way features while providing a welcoming glow to approaching visitors,” he explains. Comparatively, gooseneck barn lights are manufactured big and are designed to project light away from the home, rather than being close to the wall. “We find that most customers don’t want to illuminate the wall but rather the walking spaces in-between,” Stringer explains. With a better spread of light directly below the gooseneck arm, you can provide more illumination without resorting to a higher wattage globe.
Stringer explains that for country-style homes with bare rafters, chain-hung pendants permit the electrical termination to be away from the mounting point. This allows the customer to retrofit existing lights whilst also keeping the richness of the ceiling they’ve created. Where customers have pitched roofs, Stringer suggests Barn Light Australia’s stem pendants to be ideal in keeping it both industrial and welcoming to the home. For your entryway or garden path, Barn Light Australia has a large range of straight armed or gooseneck outdoor lighting choices, all with accessories to allow for the most daunting of country rains. In areas of high winds or breezes, Stringer recommends stem pendants or chain hung pendants, otherwise standard cord pendants are desirable for the country home.
From Cottage To Barn
Specialising in the manufacturing of outdoor rated, modern and vintage styled lighting, Barn Light Australia’s pride is crafting light fixtures that can be treasured for generations to come. In a niche of their own, Stringer’s durable outdoor lights look good and won’t cost the Earth, with their products being made from highly recyclable aluminium. “We’re focused on durability beyond price,” Stringer says, “using high performance powder coat colours and wiring all our lights in our workshop to create a truly Australian product,” he says. Customers often create an emotional connection with a particular shade style they have an affinity for, Stringer says. “We then have the flexibility to work with the various sizes of that look and have different mountings to suit each space,” he explains. Part of the benefit of being modular is Barn Light Australia’s unique ability to allow for different lighting styles to be mixed and matched.
“We take immense pride in recreating vintage and captivating lighting designs that seamlessly blend with your home, business or barn’s aesthetic,” Stringer says. “The bespoke, handcrafted nature of our light fixtures evokes a sense of nostalgia for a time when older manufacturing techniques demanded the use of quality materials,” Stringer says. “These artisanal creations carry our legacy forward, seamlessly blending classic design with modern functionality to illuminate any space,” he explains. The resulting final product is not only visually stunning, but also highly functional.
Images courtesy of Barn Light Australia